August 14, 2013 Arts & Culture The Surreal Life By Tobias Carroll A young woman from an affluent family finds herself dreading her formal entrance into high society. An affable hyena offers to take her place; the young woman acquiesces, but the hyena demands a face to wear in place of her own. A maid enters, and the hyena murders her. The debutante doesn’t object; she merely asks that the killing be done quickly. Later, the debutante learns of what transpired at dinner: the hyena’s masquerade persisted until she took umbrage to the cake being served. She stood, tore off her false face, and escaped through a window. All of this takes place in Leonora Carrington’s short story “The Debutante.” The motifs it contains recur throughout her fiction: an occasionally amoral protagonist; animals that speak and attract no alarm while doing so; and a satirical jab at certain institutions—here, the wealthy. Carrington is best known for her surrealist paintings and sculptures, but her idiosyncratic literary legacy is equally deserving of attention. Carrington’s best-known work of prose, the novel The Hearing Trumpet, begins on a note of gentle absurdity and gradually becomes truly bizarre. Marian Leatherby, the novel’s protagonist, is an elderly woman living with her son and daughter-in-law. Using the titular device, she learns that they plan to place her in a home; after she arrives there, her narration gives way to a low-grade conspiracy narrative. Marian discovers evidence of mysterious gatherings, disappearances, and hints of the supernatural. Ultimately, all this leads to a total reordering of the terrestrial order: a world “transformed by the snow and ice.” Marian anticipates the day when “the planet is peopled with cats, werewolves, bees, and goats. We all fervently hope that this will be an improvement on humanity …” Read More
August 14, 2013 Bulletin Rowan Ricardo Phillips Wins 2013 Osterweil Award By Sadie Stein Photo by Sue Kwon. Many congratulations go out to our frequent contributor and sometimes outfielder Rowan Ricardo Phillips, whose book The Ground has just won the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. The Osterweil “recognizes the high literary character of the published work to date of a new and emerging American poet of any age and the promise of further literary achievement.” Judges cited his work’s “vivid images and rhythms, its fully present, personal voice, its lightning-bolt sincerity.” We heartily concur.
August 14, 2013 On the Shelf Ron Burgundy Is Writing a Memoir, and Other News By Sadie Stein In the immortal words of David Cross, “When you misuse the word literally, you are using it in the exact opposite way it was intended.” He must be dismayed at the growing usage of its “informal” meaning. Is comedic literature making a comeback? Random House’s Crown Archetype imprint certainly hopes so: they’re releasing Let Me Off at the Top! My Classy Life and Other Musings, a memoir by anchorman Ron Burgundy. A ton of unpublished romances by the remarkably prolific Barbara Cartland will be published posthumously. Bucking trends, Enigma Books—specializing in science fiction, fantasy, and mystery—is opening in Queens.
August 13, 2013 Arts & Culture Always Remember By Sadie Stein What were you doing this past Sunday? Something special, we hope. Because this past Sunday, the eleventh of August, was the seventy-sixth anniversary of an amazing event. And we cannot improve upon the concise description of our diligent friends at Today in History. “Ernest Hemingway confronted Max Eastman in the offices of Scribner’s on Fifth Avenue. Because Eastman had cast aspersions on Hemingway’s macho persona, Hemingway pinned him on the floor, exposed Eastman’s hairless chest, then exposed his own hairy one and laughed.”
August 13, 2013 Odd Jobs Wrench By Eric Neuenfeldt I landed my first job in a bike shop at fifteen. My initial assignment was to bleach a deep sink in a bathroom that hadn’t been cleaned since the shop opened five years before. I gloved up and went at it with a brush for the first hour of my shift. The manager stood in the doorway for a few minutes and told me when I scrubbed the rest of the bathroom he would let me dust bikes and chase spiders out of helmets in the showroom. He looked like a fat Lance Armstrong, or how I imagine Armstrong would look if his steroid admission led to obesity and an addiction to slot machines at truck-stop casinos. He liked to wear cycling socks with martini glasses on them. He shaved his thick legs and sported tight khaki shorts year-round. After a couple weeks on the job, it was pretty clear to me the manager had two serious goals for his day: consume two king-size Snickers and race the only other employee around the shop on Razor scooters at least a dozen times. The other employee held the title of head mechanic. A small Bible college in Florida had recently expelled him after he allegedly shared a motel room in Memphis with a female classmate. Of course, he flatly denied it, not that anyone cared. I got the sense he really didn’t want to go back down to the swamps to sweat and study international ministry. He was content at the shop. During the day, he would clamp a repair bike in the stand, ignore it, and just eat several Tupperware containers of Thai food. He used his shop apron as a napkin. When they weren’t racing scooters or eating, they were dismantling the racks and fixtures and rearranging the showroom. The manager would pace around the showroom and pick caramel out of his molars and say, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” After they made me move all the fixtures and bikes back to the original setup a few times, I figured out they were just trying to construct new courses for their scooter races. The two of them had time for these types of projects. I scrubbed the bathroom, dusted accessories in the showroom, and fetched pizzas that dripped grease all over my jeans. The owner never stopped by the shop, and we rarely had to deal with customers. When customers did walk into the showroom, they just picked up their unfinished repair bikes to bring to a shop with a competent mechanic on duty. In the three months I worked there, I made one big sale: an entry-level mountain bike to a guy with visible anxiety problems. Through his panic attack, he told me he’d never learned to ride a bike and was prepared to confront his fear. The transaction taught me working sales was the lousiest job in the shop because there was a moment in almost every sale where you had no choice but to make the customer keenly aware of their biggest physical or psychological insecurity—bike manufacturers do set weight limits, they don’t make adult bikes for the unusually short or tall. After flipping through the wholesaler’s catalog for half an hour, I had to tell the guy we couldn’t order adult training wheels. The manager listened to the entire transaction from his shitty little office, a dressing room he’d converted into his command center. Afterward, he berated me for the sale, claiming the guy was just going to return the thing. He was right. Two days later the guy wheeled the bike into the shop after taking a nasty spill, looking to return it. He had a big patch of road rash on his cheek. I had to clean up the bike and install new grips. The manager took the cost of the grips out of my last paycheck. Read More
August 13, 2013 Arts & Culture Hell Is Other Gamers By Sadie Stein I am perfectly willing to believe that The Novelist, a video game that follows the quotidian struggles of a writer named Dan Kaplan, is a thought-provoking exercise for anyone who plays and an interesting evolution in the way we think of gaming. I also believe that, for anyone who writes, playing it would be an existential nightmare. Says the game’s creator, Kent Hudson, There’s no winning or losing … You play through and get a story that my hope—and this sounds so pretentious—but my hope is that as you’re presented with the same fundamental question in nine different ways over the course of the game, that you start to learn about your own values. And by the end … maybe your guy has written the greatest book ever but his wife left him and his kid is getting in trouble at school at the time. Well, I guess when push comes to shove you’ve decided that career’s more important than family. Or vice versa. I wanted to test the game out, but just reading this induced a sense of crushing panic about all my bad life choices. (I’m also terrible at games and my Dan Kaplan would obviously be a sad sack who ended up alone in an SRO.) That said, do read the entire, thoughtful Kokatu piece on The Novelist’s development; it’s fascinating stuff. I’ll be in the corner, weeping.